(October 19, 2013 at 7:06 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: I regret having brought up Stalin and Mao. Why do you guys jump on the low hanging fruit rather than address the more substantive part of the post?
Perhaps because your post boiled down to nothing substantial. You used a lot of words, but you didn't end up saying much.
And you seem to be under the impression that a belief that all of the universe is simply compiled of physical processes doesn't account for abstract concepts. What you can't seem to grasp is that humans create these abstract concepts, and the human mind reduces to physical processes. Just because a human can contemplate the idea of freedom does not mean that freedom is anything more than a fanciful notion of a physical brain. We invent ideas and concepts as we attempt to navigate this chatoic world and determine what effects different things have upon our existence. The ability to create value from that does not entail that life cannot be reduced to physical processes.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell